Scientists have discovered a tiny grain of "foreign" dust created by the death of a missing star.
The tiny speck of star dust was found inside a chondritic meteorite in Antarctica, having been projected into space by a star that exploded and died before it. same as our own sun exists.
Small pieces of grain like the new discovery are thought to help create the early mix of materials that helped shape the sun and our planets – and possibly life. But they are rarely seen because it is so hard for them to survive in the chaos of the early solar system.
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Scientists are now hoping that the small and lucky grain could offer a glimpse of the conditions that helped shape everything around us.
"As real dust from stars, these presolar grains give us insight into the building blocks from which our solar system was formed," said Pierre Haenecour, lead author of the new document published in Nature. . "They also provide us with a direct snapshot of the conditions a star was in when that grain formed."
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1/30 Solar eruption
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2/30 NASA celebrates 50 years of escape into space
For 50 years, NASA "dresses" for release in space. In this 1984 photograph of the first space-free exit in astronomy, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is at the heart of the first "field trial" of a backpack device to Nitrogen propulsion called "Apparel Maneuver Unit (UM)".
Nasa
3/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple
The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 – more commonly known as WR 124 – and the nebula M1-67 that surrounds it
ESA / Hubble & NASA
4/30 Veil Nebula Supernova Remaining
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unveiled in great detail a small section of the Veil Nebula – the expanding remains of a huge star that exploded about 8,000 years ago
5/30 The launch of the Soyuz TMA-15M rocket
The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket, launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, November 24, 2014, will transport three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the inhabitants of the satellite to celebrate their holidays
Nasa
6/30 Earth of the ISS
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Nasa
7/30 Black hole Friday
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Nasa
8/30 NuSTAR
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Nasa
9/30 Cassiopeia A c
A false color image of Cassiopeia A including data from the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes and the Chandra X-ray observatory
Nasa
10/30 Orion capsule splashes
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Nasa
11/30 Earth observations of Gemini IV in 1965
This photo of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The crew of the Gemini IV conducted scientific experiments, including photographs of the weather and terrain of the Earth, for the remainder of their four-day mission following the release into space Ed White's history on June 3.
12/30 March frozen slopes
This image of an area of the surface of Mars, about 1.5 km by 3 km, shows frosted gullies on a slope facing south in a crater. The photo was taken by NASA's HiRISE camera, mounted on its Mars reconnaissance orbiter.
Nasa
13/30 Yellowstone from the space
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Nasa
14/30 Saturn
This near-infrared color image shows specular reflection, or the color of the sun, on a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Titan, the moon of Saturn.
Nasa
15/30 Worlds apart
Although Mimas and Pandora, represented here, orbit both around Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by the standards of the moon (50 miles or 81 kilometers in diameter), is elongated and irregularly shaped. Mimas (396 kilometers), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere because of its own gravity imposed by its superior mass
Nasa
16/30 Solar eruption
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Nasa
17/30 Great galaxy of magellanic clouds
Image of the galaxy of great magellanic clouds seen in infrared light by the Herschel space observatory. Regions of space such as this one are those where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust.
Nasa
18/30 Mars Rover Spirit
Mars Rover Spirit of NASA took the first picture of Spirit since the beginning of the communication problems a week earlier. The picture shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack
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19/30 Aurora morning of the space station
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20/30 Launch of History – Making STS-41G Mission in 1984
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21/30 A new perspective on an extraordinary group of galaxies
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22/30 Hubble sees a galactic sunflower
The arrangement of the spiral arms in the Messier galaxy 63, visible here in an image of the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recalls the motif located in the center of a sunflower.
ESA / Hubble & amp; NASA
23/30 Pluto's picture
Four images of the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with Ralph's instrument color data to create this enhanced overall color view of Pluto.
24/30 Fresh crater near Sirenum Fossae, Mars area
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft acquired this enlarged image of a "fresh" impact crater (at the geological scale, although quite old to the human scale) in the region of Sirenum Fossae of Mars. This impact crater seems relatively recent because it has a clean border and well preserved ejectas.
25/30 Hubble looks at the busiest place in the Milky Way
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NASA & amp; ESA
26/30 An astronaut seen from space
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27/30 Giant relief on Mars
On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy relief formed by the wind, or forms of wind beds: undulations, transverse wind ridges, dunes and what is called "draa".
28/30 Expedition 39 Landing
A sokol combination helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the probe's landing with 39 Koichi Wakata shipping commander of the Japanese Agency. Aerospace Exploration (JAXA), Commander Soyuz Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio. of NASA near the city of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan
(NASA / Bill Ingalls)
29/30 The big red spot of Jupiter seen by Voyager I
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30/30 The Chandra observatory sees a heart in the darkness
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The grain has been named LAP-149 and is the only known piece of graphite and silicate grains that scientists can trace back to the particular type of stellar explosion to which it has managed to survive. After being driven out by this eruption, he flew through space and arrived in the region that is now our solar system, finding himself caught in a primitive meteorite.
Novae, like the one who threw the speck of dust, occurs when a binary star system includes the rest of a dying star known as the White War, attached to another star that is a main sequence star or a red giant. As the white dwarf erases, he destroys the substance of his greatest companion. Once it's big enough, it emits new chemical elements, deep in space, to diffuse them across the universe and help diffuse entirely new materials towards others. solar systems.
This process made it possible to draw the universe from the hydrogen, helium and lithium that were present when it began to evolve towards the rich and varied set of elements that surround us today. Without such a dispersion, there would be no life, consisting of the most complex and recent elements disseminated during such violent encounters.
To better understand this process, researchers analyzed the small grain at the atomic level with the aid of a highly developed technology. In doing so, they discovered how foreign it was, by discovering huge amounts of a strange carbon isotope called 13C.
"The isotopic composition of carbon in everything we have ever sampled and coming from any planet or body in our solar system usually varies by a factor of about 50," he said. Haenecour. "The 13C we found in the LAP-149 is enriched more than 50,000 times.
"These results provide further evidence in the laboratory that high-carbon and oxygen-rich novae grains have contributed to the building blocks of our solar system."
The stars that gave birth to the tiny grains of star dust will now be dead long ago. But by studying their composition, scientists can understand their living conditions, write the researchers in the new article.
"Our discovery gives us insight into a process we could never see on Earth," Haenecour added. "He explains to us how the dust grains form and move inside when expelled by the nova.We now know that carbonaceous and silicate dust grains can form in the same nova ejecta and that 39 they are transported through chemically distinct dust piles ejecta, something that has been predicted by novae models but never found in a specimen. "
Scientists are unable to say exactly how old the grain is because it does not contain enough atoms. They hope to find new larger pieces to try to understand how they contributed to the formation of our solar system.